In official reports, the visit always merits just a short note in which the refutation of Curveball’s tale seems almost incidental, as in this sentence from a footnote in the Robb-Silberman report.

When United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) inspectors visited the site on February 9, 2003, they found that the wall was a permanent structure and could find nothing to corroborate Curveball’s reporting.

Whereas Drogin captures the thoroughness of the UNMOVIC inspectors in fascinating detail.

Climbing down [into the warehouse, UNMOVIC microbiologist Rocco Casagrande] opened his backpack and donned his Tyvek, a thin white polyethylene zip-up jumpsuit, and a pair of gloves. Then he got on his hands and knees. Using two cotton swabs moistened in sterile water, he scraped samples of dirt and dust from the tarlike epoxy that filled joints in the cement floor. If the Iraqis produced anthrax or other biological agents here, traces probably seeped or settled deep in the crevices and cracks. The DNA might survive even if the Iraqis had sanitized the site.

Casagrande snapped the tips off the two swabs, put them into a pair of sterile tubes with screw tops, and labeled them. Standing up, he saw Fosbrook, the deputy team leader, point to the nearby wall. He looked over and spotted two large holes for air conditioners. He nodded okay and carefully swabbed cracks around each hole in case an exhaust fan had pulled contaminated dust into the air exchange system. He tubed and labeled those samples as well.

This description goes on at length, describing the Iraqis laughing as the inspectors tapped the walls looking for the doors Curveball had described.

The exit door was more mystifying. The entire northwest corner of the L supposedly worked on a huge pivot of some kind and swung to one side. This was Curveball’s beloved door. Except it wasn’t there. The base of the wall was solid, unbroken concrete. It had no hinge, no swivel, no clamshell door or device.

[snip]

[Kay Mereish, head of the bioweapons inspection team] and Fosbrook ran their hands up and down the surface of the walls inside and out, searching for hidden seams or alterations. They pressed their weight against it, pushing with all their strength to see if it moved. They looked for hidden levers, handles, or switches, anything they could pull or press to open a secret door like in a haunted house movie. The Iraqis in the room watched them quizzically at first. Then they began to laugh.

It’s a picture of weapons inspector as detective, rather than bland bureaucratic footnote. This passage–like so much of Drogin’s book–fleshes out the sketchy details we’ve all heard about Curveball, to provide a colorful picture of just how bad Curveball’s story was.

Drogin also maps the animosities between intelligence agencies and the careerism of individual analysts and shows how both contributed to the failure to debunk Curveball. Drogin describes vulgarity-riddled screaming matches and petty infighting between the WMD analysts championing Curveball’s tale and the clandestine agents who knew to distrust unreliable defectors.

"The Curveball case is really a mess," Margaret began.

She was embroiled in a huge fuss with the geek squad at WINPAC, she explained [to Tyler Drumheller, her boss]. The bioweapons analysts had gotten really made because she was asking too many questions about Curveball. They had staked their credibility on the Iraqi. His mobile weapons labs formed a key part of the National Intelligence Estimate.

"They’re really pissed at us," she added cheerfully.

He reviews the mutual distrust between Germany’s BND and the CIA, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and UNMOVIC, even the CIA and Britain’s MI6. He describes one after another analyst writing reports that repeat what superiors want to hear. As with the details of the WMD hunt, we’ve heard dry descriptions about the lack of cooperation and careerism. But with his vivid narrative, Drogin communicates these tensions in a way that helps lay people understand how the tensions created the intelligence failures that led up to the Iraq war.

In these two areas, Drogin’s book is a superb contribution toward the history of the Iraq war. More than any other book or report I’ve read on the war, the book provides a human face to the the technical issues at the heart of intelligence debates leading up the war.

That said, understand what this book is not. This book is not a book about why we went to war. Partly, that’s because the book has a much more narrow scope; it describes just one of four major intelligence failures (the aluminum tubes, Niger yellowcake, and the Al Qaeda claims being the others). It doesn’t describe why, even when the CIA got intelligence right (as with Cheney’s goddamn Mohammed-Atta-in-Prague myth), that debunked intelligence still formed a crucial part of the case for war. And though the book notes, on several occasions, final decision-makers declining to heed warnings on Curveball because "this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curveball said or didn’t say," the book doesn’t explore the implications of a war that would go forward with or without the corroborating intelligence. This book treats neither the many documented cases of political figures "sexing up" the intelligence nor, with the exception of David Kay and to a much lesser extent George Tenet, the motivations of those high level figures who could have (and in Kay’s case, did) refute that sexed up intelligence. So while this book paints a compelling picture of how the intelligence community failed, this book does not explain the role of that failure in the larger move to go to war.

For this reason, I think the phrase in the title, "the con man who caused the war," does the book a real disservice. Curveball didn’t cause the Iraq war any more than Rupert Murdoch or Osama bin Laden did. The phrase promises something the book doesn’t deliver (and has sidetracked more than one on-line discussion of the book), while slighting the rich and valuable narrative that the book does offer.

That said, it’s a good read. It offers rich visuals of places like the Perfume Palace, the ISG’s base in Baghdad. It offers extensive portraits of the intelligence professionals involved in the Curveball case. The book takes the colossal intelligence failure behind the Curveball story and turns it into an engaging spy narrative accessible to anyone.

I’ll start questions with one about Jerry–one of the WINPAC analysts who championed the credibility of Curveball, but then recanted after he saw the counter-evidence in Baghdad, and David Kay. Roughly the last third of the book describes the ISG debunking the Curveball tale. As part of that, you describe how both men came to rethink their earlier certitude about the Curveball tale, largely because both saw the evidence disproving the tale first hand. Watching these men rethink their beliefs was a fascinating sub-narrative of the book.

Their trajectory is one that happens all too rarely, it seems, in our intelligence debates (witness the current uproar over the Iran NIE).

What do you think allowed each of these men to dramatically rethink their beliefs? Was it the close working relationship of the analysts and the operatives? Was it simply their physical presence in Baghdad, where they could see the sites Curveball had talked about and meet with Curveball’s mother? Was it some distance from the political pressure to produce a given result?

Welcome, Bob, glad to have you here. And thanks, emptywheel — I like to think that the posters I have on the wall with pointing lines and stickies relating all these agencies to one another is what the inside of your head looks like.

Shucks. I wanted to ask why Colin Powell made such a bone headed presentation to the U.N. and now read that the book doesn’t cover the policymakers’ use of the phony case.

Even so, I LOL when Powell put up the sat pic of the 4 ‘mobile bioweapons labs’. It was just a grainy photo of 4 rectangles with a red circle drawn around them. Why would anyone believe that it was what Powell said it was? That was the most ludricrous part of the whole presentation.

So while this book paints a compelling picture of how the intelligence community failed, this book does not explain the role of that failure in the larger move to go to war.

Bob: Was their really a failure of the intelligence community iself, or can it be viewed as a top-down intentional disruption of proper information flow and decision-making imposed by the highest levels of the administration?

My question: How much of what “Curveball” did was on his own initiative? That is, how much was strictly his idea, and how much was it as a result of the demands of the Americans with whom he was working?

Yes, this is my way of bringing up the subject of PNAC, Doug Feith and the Office of Special Stovepiping Plans, and Ahmad Chalabi (aka Mr. Judy Miller).

Righto. I’m beginning to think that most “intelligence failures” are actually intelligence manipulations by Prez who want to do something & need an excuse. I’m thinking Iran 2005 NIE, “failure” of CIA to accurately assess Soviet military power & nearness of collapse, and there are probably many more I haven’t thought of.

Hi everyone:
Sorry to keep you waiting. I got caught in Xmas shopping traffic!
I want to make clear that my book is not about policy or trying to understand George Bush’s mindset. I wrote a non-fiction spy story that seeks to unravel one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history. Time and again, the Curveball case took another step forward due to astonishing ineptitude, bureaucratic rivalries, tawdry ambition and spineless leadership.
I’ll start to answer your questions now. Thanks for welcoming me to the Lake!
Bob Drogin

Emptywheel, your question points to something Bob wrote near the end of the book:

Declaring Cureball a fabricator in the end was a cop-out for the CIA. It implied that US intelligence had fallen for a clever hoax. The truth was more disturbing. The defector didn’t con the spies so much as they conned themselves. George Tenet tried to please the president. Even as the case began to collapse, he and his aides held on to the lies.

Contrast this with the picture EW noted on the two who revised their thinking.

The most believable disinformation artists spin tales that their hearers *want* to be true. Curveball knew his audience.

That’s why I find the narrative of Kay and Jerry so compelling. Frankly, I read Jerry’s report on the bioweapons labs and it was abysmally bad. So I’m surprised to learn he saw the light at the end. And I’m curious about what it would take to get more people to reconsider their things they believe on faith.

The Iran NIE is remarkable because it clearly shows the intelligence community seeking to restore its role as an independent collector and analyst of intelligence. In Iraq, we saw the corruption of that traditional role. It was used to provide a pretext for war. As a result, CIA leaders took endless shortcuts. Normally, an NIE takes six to ten months to prepare. The current Iran NIE was more than a year in preparation. They ginned up the 2002 NIE on Iraq in only 19 days…

Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorrty to say that I haven’t read your book, so I’m at a bit of a disadvantage here. But my question relates to the Downing Street Memos wherein it is alleged that the “intelligence was fixed around the policy”.

So if that’s the case, weren’t the purported Curveball confessions simply a set of lies that furthered the case for war?

Curveball was, as you know, the code name for a young Iraqi chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999. He began spinning his story about Saddam’s WMD in 2000, before Bush was elected. His motivation was to gain political asylum in Germany, not to start a war.
I focus on Curveball because he played such an outside role in the run-up to the war. The president cited his supposed “eyewitness” account in the 2003 State of the Union speech, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made the mobile biological production vehicles the highlight of his address to the UN Security Council in February 2003. Yet it was all a hoax. Curveball made up his story.
I argue in the book, however, that the CIA conned itself. It heard what it wanted to hear, and saw what it wanted to see, to tell the White House what it wanted to know. If US authorities failed to connect the dots before 9/11, in Curveball, they made up the dots.
What Powell didn’t know when he went to the UN was that the CIA had never confirmed Curveball’s story, never vetted his background, never interviewed him and didn’t even know his name. They ignored repeated warnings from German authorities that the story was unconfirmed, and discounted warnings from members of the clandestine service who feared he might be a fabricator.

Curveball was, as you know, the code name for a young Iraqi chemical engineer who defected to Germany in 1999. He began spinning his story about Saddam’s WMD in 2000, before Bush was elected. His motivation was to gain political asylum in Germany, not to start a war.
I focus on Curveball because he played such an outside role in the run-up to the war. The president cited his supposed “eyewitness” account in the 2003 State of the Union speech, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made the mobile biological production vehicles the highlight of his address to the UN Security Council in February 2003. Yet it was all a hoax. Curveball made up his story.
I argue in the book, however, that the CIA conned itself. It heard what it wanted to hear, and saw what it wanted to see, to tell the White House what it wanted to know. If US authorities failed to connect the dots before 9/11, in Curveball, they made up the dots.
What Powell didn’t know when he went to the UN was that the CIA had never confirmed Curveball’s story, never vetted his background, never interviewed him and didn’t even know his name. They ignored repeated warnings from German authorities that the story was unconfirmed, and discounted warnings from members of the clandestine service who feared he might be a fabricator.

Exactly. The old saying “You can’t cheat an honest man” applies here.

This is part and parcel of how Bush and the PNAC Platoon operates. None of them likes to hear things that don’t support their take on reality. Bush is notorious for his “gimme only the good news” briefings.

What Powell didn’t know when he went to the UN was that the CIA had never confirmed Curveball’s story, never vetted his background, never interviewed him and didn’t even know his name.

So why didn’t Powelll know? Did he not ask? I had a small email exchange with a NYT reporter in the runnup to war. The crux of the reporter’s message to me was that Powell had spent days and days on his presentation, had thoroughly vetted it, and wouldn’t put anything in that he wasn’t absolutely sure of. I grinned about the gullibility of the NYT reporter at the time, but still, why didn’t Powell ask the right Qs about Curveball?

I interviewed Powell for the book, and wrote a pretty fascinating chapter about the four days he and his staff spent out at CIA headquarters preparing for the UN speech. They first went through a 48-page draft prepared by Scooter Libby’s office, but literally threw it in the trash after they decided it was filled with half-truths, rumors, unsubstantiated allegations and theories. At that point, Powell asked Tenet for his best stuff and Tenet gave him the 2002 NIE (the one they churned out in 19 days) as the template for the speech. As you know, an NIE is supposed to be the gold standard of US intelligence.
Tenet and his top aides repeatedly assured Powell that the Curveball material was rock solid and unchallenged. Powell said he tossed out the aluminum tubes, and other bogus theories, and decided to make the mobile bio-weapons factories the centerpiece of his speech. He was furious when the case ultimately proved a fraud.

I’d like to go back to your comment about the Iran NIE–I’d love to have you expand on that.

Do you think the intelligence agencies are playing together better under the new DNI structure? Or was it simply time and McConnell’s new sourcing and admissions of what you don’t know standards? And from your knowledge of the key players (particularly working on the story that some officers were going to go public with the NIE if it weren’t declassified)–why were they able and willing to tell the truth this time, unlike with Iraq?

Thanks for coming Mr. Drogin. Given the difference between the care that you suggest went into the recent Iran NIE, and the carelessness/self delusion that went into the Iraq assessments — is the difference caused by a major turnover of people? One of the narratives out there is that the Cheney/Rumsfeld minions biased how we looked at everything, but this suggests the desire to see what they wanted to see was more widespread. If the answer is the Cheneyites, then are they still there?

As I wrote above, Powell insisted that he DID ask the hard questions. He said Tenet assured him that Curveball’s information was the best the CIA had. What Tenet didn’t tell him was a virtual war had erupted at lower levels inside the CIA should rely on Curveball. Tenet’s aides ignored warnings from the station chief in Berlin, the chief of the European division and others about Curveball’s reliability.
In Powell’s defense, he the secretary of state, not the head of US intelligence. Except for the analysts the small intelligence wing at the Department of State, he had to rely on the CIA and other agencies.

Except for the analysts the small intelligence wing at the Department of State, he had to rely on the CIA and other agencies.

But didn’t he also have to know that the entire top-down high-level imperative was “don’t tell us anything we don’t want to hear”? I’m sorry, but I really think Powell if full of it, and is only claiming he was duped once it became obvious that the “greet American soldiers with flowers” delusion was revealed for what it was.

Tenet and his top aides repeatedly assured Powell that the Curveball material was rock solid and unchallenged.

Thanks your your answers. So you lay the fault at Tenet who refused to pass along the controversy beneath him. That leads to 2 more Qs for me.
1. Did you read Tenet’s book or interview him? What does he have to say for himself on this matter?
2. If Powell remembered any of his high school biology, he should have been skeptical just based on how difficult it would be to maintain the sterilty & containment requirements of producing biohazards under mobile conditions. That’s what didn’t pass the smell test for me, even before you began writing the real story in the LAT.

The jury is still out on the DNI. Certainly some CIA officials I know complain it just adds another level of bureaucracy to a system that is barely functional at times. But Mike McConnell clearly is more skilled than his predecessor, and Gen. Hayden is a shining star compared to the hapless Porter Goss.
I take McConnell at his word that he released the NIE on Iran because it so sharply contradicted the 2005 version, and he wanted to correct the record. We can assume that the remarkable about face might have leaked out, but there’s no way to know.
As for “telling the truth” on Iraq, the problem is that most intelligence officers believed Saddam had some WMD. Even if they didn’t believe individual pieces of evidence, or challenged parts of the story, almost no one understood the truth – that he had abandoned the programs back in 1991 and never restarted them.

In this case, the DIA’s Defense HUMINT Service was the liason with the German intelligence officers handling Curveball. Unfortunately, the DIA totally dropped the ball – they made no effort to vet the source or to check the information. They funneled it directly into US intelligence channels in what an investigator later called a case of “immaculate reception.” Unfortunately, CIA analysts assumed the information had been confirmed. It was inexcusable tradecraft.

Even if they didn’t believe individual pieces of evidence, or challenged parts of the story, almost no one understood the truth – that he had abandoned the programs back in 1991 and never restarted them.

I have an army major efriend who believed something like that, and also thought that Saddam Hussein could not have gotten rid of everything he had in the past. My response was that SH made damned sure everything was gone so his internal enemies wouldn’t get ahold of it.

Why do I think Powell was more furious at having been made to look the fool than anything else?

Lemme guess. Perhaps it started with Major Colin Powell’s role in covering up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Achieving some success in creating useful disinformation, this proved to be the starting point to Powell’s meteoric rise in life…

The cynical among us believe that Powell took the standard route to success in the military. Fabrications, frauds, prevarications and bald-faced lies being the coin of that realm.

BTW, I have to give you a VERY BIG THANKS for your LAT reporting on this subject. That was long before I found a great place to hang out like FDL, was almost certain that there were no WMDs in Iraq, but had no one (well, just one) to check it with. It was crazy making, feeling like your the only one who knows the truth. So when articles like yours came out that gave me solid reasons for knowing I got it right, it was very important.

There’s lots of blame to go around in this case. The BND, Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, blames the CIA for “sexing up” the intelligence on Curveball. The head of Britain’s MI6 blames the BND for mistranslating or misunderstanding parts of Curveball’s story, thereby exaggerating his story. The Robb Silberman Commission blamed the Defense Humint Service for making no attempt to vet the source of his information. Inside the CIA, members of the clandestine service blamed the analysts inside Winpac, the weapons intelligence nonproliferation center, for focusing only on Curveball’s supposed information (ie, was it plausible, did he know the right temperatures and pipe fittings, etc.), and not considering whether he was lying.
Tenet, in my view, presided over the worst intelligence failure in modern times. In his book, he briefly acknowledges the CIA’s failure with Curveball, but then devotes 8 pages to trashing Tyler Drumheller, the head of the European Division, for not warning more people that Curveball might be a fabricator. The written record is clear that Drumheller and his staff wrote memos, e-mails, and had meetings to raise objections about the case. In the end, Drumheller and his crew were the only folks inside the CIA to get it essentially right. Tenet, it appears, can’t forgive him for that, so tries to shift the blame instead.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Many people blame “the media” for the rush to war, and I argue that we’re not a monolith. Some news organizations provided highly skeptical reporting of Bush administration claims. But it’s impossible to prove a negative. And we never could get access to the core intelligence.

My question is this: If Curveball didn’t exist, would he have been invented?
I realize that this goes beyond the scope of your book, but surely you’ve thought about this issue. The people who wanted to make a case for war, so they needed someone like Curveball, so Voila!

In fact, could you make the argument that Curveball reinvented himself in order to become what the policy-makers wanted?

Why was DIA so much more inclined to let bad intel sources, including Curveball, through than CIA?

To amplify on Bob’s reply, I’d suggest curious readers do Google searches on “Karen Kwiatkowsky”, “Office of Special Plans” (especially the Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker by that title, “Douglas Feith”, “Paul Wolfowitz” and “Abe Shulsky”.

What you’ll eventually find is that the so-called “intelligence” being created inside the Pentagon amounted to nothing more than lies and fabrications being spun to support the already predetermined plan to attack Saddam Hussein and occupy the second richest oil-fields on the planet.

In particular, Karen Kwiatkowsky wrote a series of three essays in The American Conservative Magazine about 3 years ago that very clearly lays out the condidtions she saw as a member of the Office of Special Plans. What she reveals there shocked me at the time. I found it hard to believe that our government could be in the hands of such determined liars.

Thanks.
Germany, France and Russia never claimed that Saddam was free of WMD. Nor, more importantly, did Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspectors. The debate at the UN before the war rarely focused on whether Saddam had illicit weapons programs – that was assumed by every Western intelligence service – but what to do about it. The question, as it is with Iran today, was how does the world deal with a nation that violates UN resolutions. Germany, France and Russia argued that stiffer sanctions, no-fly zones and more robust coercive disarmament could keep Saddam in his box. The Bush administration and a handful of allies believed war was the answer.
The US and Europe have worked more closely on Iran in the last two years. Sarkozy in France and Merkel in Germany arguably have taken a tougher stance than the US in recent months, the UK under Gordon Brown has eased back. So the nature of the alliance has really shifted.

Thank you so much, Mr. Drogin, for visiting with us today!
In my mind, I have always separated the players mentioned in your book into discreet catagories-

1) Folks who were skeptical of the presence of a weapons program or programs, but had to do their level best to find them or disprove the thesis altogether (at great personal and professional risk)-

2) The types who wanted desperately to find evidence to back up the claims they had been forwarding on behalf of the Administration (obviously the most susceptible to getting snookered in all this)-

3) Those at the top of the food-chain who were using the mere possibility, however remote, of the existence of a program or programs as a lever to achieve a policy objective (attack), and, barring any evidence at all of their existence, were wiling to manufacture them.

Obviously, I always drew a dark-line distinction between the second and third categories, because no matter how gullible the first two groupings were, they were more obliged to be bound to the truth, should it come out.

But I’m intrigued by the seamless movement of information between these layers. Powell and his staff are not stupid people. They had to know, had to know, that once they had discarded the “findings” presented to them from Lewis Libby’s office, they were about to become the chumps of history, and whatever good had come of their careers and reputations, the maintenance of that would lie in the hands of those who sought to send them out into the big world stage and make them into those chumps.

I imagine Powell looking down at the mess layed out before him on the conference table at CIA, and wondering what the Hell he was going to say.

Did you get any sense from Powell that he had any compunction about doing this presentation, specifically, resting his good name (or what was left of it by then) in the hands of the Bush Administration cronies whose policy objectives were to become his complete undoing?

I have come to the conclusion myself, that they made everything up to fit their agenda; the 2000 and 2004 election results, 9/11 official story, lead up to Iraq, the case to attack Iran, you name it…it all leads back to Bushco…all of it. The only thing they didn’t make up is the torture and spying…. Just a bunch of layers of lies. They all need to be arrested. JMHO. :>

I really have no idea if someone would make up Curveball if he didn’t exist. The fact is that he did. And he was, I believe, the key source of bad intelligence in the pre-war fiasco.
Both the Senate intelligence committee and the Robb Silberman post-war investigation wrote that without Curveball’s information, the CIA had no basis to conclude that Saddam was building biological weapons. Both groups also determined that the CIA’s chemical warfare analysts had been skeptical of the evidence on Saddam’s CW program in mid-2002. But when they saw the “high confidence” estimates from the bio-weapons side of the shop, due to Curveball, they ramped up their own estimates. So Curveball really played an extraordinary, albeit inadvertant, role.
Curveball didn’t “reinvent” himself for policy makers. He told his story back in 2000 and 2001, and his interrogations ended at the end of August 2001. He was only seeking asylum in Germany. Once he got it, he tried to reel his story back in, repeatedly contradicting his earlier claims. The Germans decided to believe his first story, however, and he had a nervous breakdown.
The CIA didn’t assume Curveball’s story was critically important at the time. But three weeks after 9/11, his file was hauled out of a CIA safe. From then on, his story took on a life of its own inside US intelligence. He wasn’t entirely to fault. I trace a series of mistranslations, miscommunications, misperceptions, misunderstandings and plain old mistakes that made his story seem increasingly more terrifying. But it was all a fraud.

Bob, my whole family has read the book and loved it. One of our questions has already been partly answered – the Germans are taking real good care of Curveball – but a follow up, if you please:

Don’t the German Intelligence agents feel stupid? Or were the cascading mistakes mostly on our end?
Will he be taken care of for the rest of his life by Germany?
Is there any possibility he’ll return to Iraq?

(completely OT, but my sister hopes you know the answer) Is the case still open on the American anthrax attacks?

I have come to the conclusion myself, that they made everything up to fit their agenda

Certainly there are grounds for such a conclusion, which I share with you. The hubris of the PNAC empire builders astonishes me. What simply astounds me however is the timidity and inability of the American public to rise to the occasion and take their country back. The worst nightmares of tyranny that troubled Jefferson and Madison have come to be today’s reality. We are a nation being run by a kleptocratic criminal mafia. Somehow the “free press”, that force that was supposed to be a brake on the worst excessses of government, has now become a defacto Ministry of Propaganda. It takes my breath away how quickly we are losing the American Dream to the enemy within.

Correct, the BND refused to let the DIA or CIA interview Curveball. The official reason they gave was Curveball spoke no English and that he hated Americans. Nether reason made any sense since US intelligence could easily have used (as is normal) a fluent German speaker who would not be identified as an American.
The Germans’ real reasons were mixed. First, they knew the CIA would never let them interview a key CIA source, so they felt what’s called pride of service. Second, the handlers in the case resented the CIA after years of abuse and distrust, and felt no reason to let them in. Thirdly, the intelligence chief previously had worked as police chief in Hamburg, and he bitterly resented US finger-pointing after 9/11 because of the German failure to identify the so-called Hamburg cell. He pointed out that the skyjackers all had moved to the US, got credit cards, flown on planes, opened bank accounts, etc. But the Bush administration blamed the Hamburg cell, and he felt no reason to help them with Curveball.

Hi Bob – regarding other defector/informers – did you come across any info about who it was that suggested that Iraq retained a force of Scud missiles? This is one aspect of Iraq’s WMD that hasn’t been covered as much as the tubes and mobile labs, but without the Scuds he had no strategic capability to strike out at surrounding and other nearby countries.

According to Bob Woodward’s book ‘Plan of Attack’ (P309) Gen Powell said: “The Scuds are not anything anyone has seen”.

Germany, France and Russia never claimed that Saddam was free of WMD. Nor, more importantly, did Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspectors.

My italics. I thought Scott Ritter said that the inspectors had gotten rid of something like 95 or 98%, and were unsure whether anything was left. That’s a very small range of uncertainty, and would strongly argue that the country wasn’t worth invading over the issue. I was always annoyed at the bureacratic way Blix stated his findings, instead of saying: For crying out loud, if there’s anything left it’s not worth going to war over.

Additionally, every single story, of which there were only 4, fell apart upon inspection (or even before). Didn’t anyone think of Occam’s razor. that the best explanation was there wasn’t anything.

Thanks so much. I’m delighted that you loved the book.
The German authorities are in denial on this case. They have never declared Curveball a fabricator because, in their view, they never declared that he was telling the truth. If they declare him a fraud, they would have to kick him out of the defector program, and fear that will frighten other sources and informants from cooperating with them in the future. So they just hope this whole case goes away.
In my view, the German authorities made critical mistakes in this case. But they also repeatedly warned the CIA, including Tenet himself, that Curveball’s information was unconfirmed. So the CIA bears a much greater share of the blame.
He’s still in Germany. I don’t know if he’ll ever go back to Iraq. I don’t know why he would want to.
Yes, the anthrax letters investigation remains open and unsolved.

Both the Senate intelligence committee and the Robb Silberman post-war investigation wrote that without Curveball’s information, the CIA had no basis to conclude that Saddam was building biological weapons.

I guess this might be an indication that these two reports are just about as useless and fanciful as the 9/11 Commission Report.

Not to be argumentative but aren’t there abundant records of U.S. and European assistance to Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs during the Iran-Iraq War? I’ve seen documentation that Hussein received anthrax and other biological weapons pre-cursors from American labs. And there is evidence that the Reagan Administration provided technical assistance to Saddam’s WMD builders, using the guise of agricultural research exchange. This is even beyond the targeting information we provided so that Hussein’s chemical weapons could be successfully used against massed Iranian troops.

As the wags have said, we have all the proof we need of Saddam’s WMD programs because we still have the receipts.

Tenet and his aides would argue that people don’t give them credit for correctly understanding Saddam’s missile program. It’s partly true, because Saddam clearly was trying to improve his missiles before the war. You can find details in UNMOVIC reports, and the final Iraq Survey Group report.
But I disagree on the nature of the threat. Without chemical, biological or nuclear warheads atop the missiles, Iraq was no different that scores of countries with missiles. The danger is what’s on the pointy end, not the delivery system.

“Curveball didn’t “reinvent” himself for policy makers. He told his story back in 2000 and 2001, and his interrogations ended at the end of August 2001. He was only seeking asylum in Germany. Once he got it, he tried to reel his story back in, repeatedly contradicting his earlier claims. The Germans decided to believe his first story, however, and he had a nervous breakdown.”

But this is my point. He was seeking asylum, and wanted a way to be sure he got it. What better way than reinventing himself as an Iraqi with insider info on WMD? Maybe its just coincidence but was he telling stories about Saddam’s WMD before he sought asylum? If he wasn’t talking about it before, and tried to “reel it back in” afterwards, and was only spinning it while he was seeking asylum, doesn’t it suggest that these two things are connected? Or is something wrong with my timeline? emptywheel is much better at timelines than I am!

Did you get any sense from Powell that he had any compunction about doing this presentation, specifically, resting his good name (or what was left of it by then) in the hands of the Bush Administration cronies whose policy objectives were to become his complete undoing?

Powell’s whole career stemmed from lying for and sucking up to the powers that be. This was his ultimate reward, but it was too late for him to turn away. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy (well, better it should have been W or Acting Prez Cheney, but we’ll take what we can get.

well, the point is that Saddam abandoned all those programs in 1991 – but we went to war in 2003 because the administration claimed Iraq was still actively producing them. Saddam was a vicious tyrant. But we went to war to destroy weapons he had not possessed for a dozen years. Worse, Saddam never had built the mobile bio-warfare factories that Secretary Powell described so vividly to the UN. The CIA conjured those up on its own…

And there were hot & cold running inspectors in the interim, including the runup to the invasion,* and sanctions that prevented SH from getting the supplies he needed for WMDs, and overflights & probably 24/7 spy sattelites in advance of the invasion. How much proff do you need?

*I kept wondering whether everybody thought the instpectors went first to the 400 sites that they thought were least likely to contain WMDs.

Powell’s whole career stemmed from lying for and sucking up to the powers that be. This was his ultimate reward, but it was too late for him to turn away. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy (well, better it should have been W or Acting Prez Cheney, but we’ll take what we can get.

Pardon the straying OT, but even now, after all that’s been said and done, I’d trade anyone, everyone at the top now, for a herd of Colin Powells. And that is not to convey any particular respect onto Powell, but to describe the depth of ill regard I have for the others.

I’m glad you said that–that’s why I used the quote I did, from them searching the warehouse. You really portrayed them in all their competence and open-mindedness.

And to repeat what bev said–thanks for joining us at the Lake. I suspect folks will continue to ask questions; a lot of people followed the intelligence battles quickly. But thanks for an engaging conversation.

Thank you all for inviting me to the Lake. I’ve enjoyed this discussion, and hope I have offered some useful insights. I urge you to read Curveball. I think it really unravels an extraordinary case that is a cautionary tale of how intelligence is supposed to work – and usually doesn’t.
I’ll check back in later tonight if anyone wants to chat further.
Thanks again.
Bob Drogin

Saddam never had built the mobile bio-warfare factories that Secretary Powell described so vividly to the UN. The CIA conjured those up on its own…

Considering the extent to which the stovepiping of fabricated evidence flowed out of Abe Shulsky’s shop, the Office of Special Plans, and considering the badgering of CIA analysts as Sy Hersh has reported, I’m not sure it is either fair or accurate to claim that authorship for the mobile biowarfare labs lies at the CIA. From all my research, I’d reached the conclusion that this fantasy was hatched either at the DoD’s OSP or in the Office of the Vice-President, and spread from there.

Now I guess I do have a reason to pick up a copy of your book, if you do cover the provenance of the mobile biowarfare labs in the book. Thanks.

One of the other things Bob covers–that I never saw elsewhere–is where Curveball’s story came from, a set of shipping containers with seed labs inside them. They were all found at the locations Curveball said the MBLs were, yet they were clearly agricultural in nature.

At least the price of oil has gone down significantly since Bush and many Democrats decided that our best course of action was to attack Iraq. And I suppose the same will hold true when some other numskull of a prez determines it’s past time to invade Iran and that we must protect “our” vital interets.

I suppose the same will hold true when some other numskull of a prez determines it’s past time to invade Iran and that we must protect “our” vital interets.

But Kiddo, George Bush has done wonders for the profitability of his constituency, the CEO of the oil majors and the military-industrial complex. From their perspective, Goerge Bush is a completely rational actor and a complete success.

Recently I learned that Allan Dulles, the guy who orchestrated the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954, was at the same time a paid member of the board of directors of the United Fruit Company which directly benefited from the overthrow of the democratically elected Arbenz government. That strikes me as being criminal.

Whenever I hear a Washington hack talk about “our national interests” I cringe. Because usually it means that we’re about to murder another few thousand people across the planet so that some rich and arrogant white man’s net worth can go even higher. And they dare to call it democracy.

It would be nice if the zombie America that continues to vote for the likes of criminal enterprises like the Bush family would get a clue about the real nature of American foreign policy.

Slightly OT I know but with regards to the Scuds again, I personally tend to think there is a bigger untold story here, being as it was Iraq’s use of these things in the first Gulf War which partly led to the sanctions and the weapons inspection process (as punishment perhaps?) in the first place. My own take on the situation is that Saddam could not account for some WMD because it had been used illegally, both in the Iran/Iraq War and again in 1991. As you suggest, I have spent much time reading UNSCOM/UNMOVIC reports and all the stuff from the ISG, as well as from every other source that I could find. What I can’t explain is why Saddam’s accounting (93 missiles used) was not challenged by the findings elsewhere, which was that 97/102 missiles were launched. It was documents relating to these Scuds and the use of CW against Iran which were not forthcoming in ‘98, this led to the UNSCOM breakdown and then directly to Operation Desert Fox, the same thing happened again in late’02/early’03 under Hans Blix. There were ‘unaccounted for’ CW warheads by Iraqi admission, yet these were never a talking point in the run-up to this most recent conflict. What I’m really asking is – do you think Saddam was caught here in a trap of his own making and furthermore was UNSCOM/UNMOVIC used to try and force him to admit to acts which were in contravention of the 1925 Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare)?

I know of the Scud discrepancies you describe, and I know UNMOVIC and the ISG looked at this in detail. Frankly, I don’t remember how they resolved it. It’s clear Saddam continued his program; UNMOVIC caught him with illicit programs and supervised destruction of rocket engines in early 2003.
You should look at the Knesset’s post-war report on Israel’s intelligence on Iraq. As I recall, there’s a wonderful bit where they trace how unresolved issues about several Scuds from 1991 steadily morph to fears of a dozen, 20, 60 and so on, until it appeared Saddam is hiding a vast fleet. But the underlying intelligence had not changed.

Curveball fled Germany in 1999 and went to Germany. No hard evidence ever was found indicated he was sent by Ahmed Chalabi, Saddam’s Mukhabarat, or anyone else. Nor is there any indication that the CIA deliberately distorted the German reports of his information. As with many screw-ups in history, a conspiracy of ineptitude provides a perfectly acceptable explanation of what what happened.

I like Scott as well. But he’s an curious guy. He quit Unscom and left Iraq in 1998 partly because, he said at the time, the UN refused to force Saddam to cooperate and give up his WMD. In 2002, he launched a lonely and futile crusade to convince the world of the exact opposite – that Saddam had hidden nothing. He argued that since US Congress had passed a policy of regime change, everything else – including WMD – was deliberate disinformation.

VP Cheney took office in 2001. The OSP was created in late 2002.
Scott Ritter first speculated in a memo about the mobile bioweapons facilities in the early 1990s, and he led a series of UN raids in Iraq in the mid-1990s to find them. Curveball defected in 1999, and his story seemed to support that theory.
There’s absolutely no evidence that the OSP, which wasn’t created until 2002, played any role here. The truth was much worse, and much more disturbing. Curveball wasn’t the feverish whispers of a group of neo-cons; his fraud became part of the official, finished product of the US intelligence community. The CIA officially brought Curveball’s information to the White House, the Congress and the public. His information wasn’t cherry picked. It appeared in hundreds of classified documents.

German intelligence interrogated Curveball from January 2000 to September 2001. He told them his story about the mobile labs in 2000, but in 2001, after he received political asylum, he had a nervous breakdown, sought to run away, refused to cooperate, etc. They finally cut off the interviews in late August 2001.

I definitely describe the story of the mobile labs. Like a bad penny, they kept turning up in classified documents. But no evidence ever was found to show they existed. It became like medieval clerics searching for witchcraft. The failure to find any proof was held up to show how important they must be since Saddam had hidden them so well…

Mr Drogin – I am so sorry I missed your Book Salon but wanted to say that your book is wonderful. The information is so important, the “mystery” tracked down with so much good evidence – and all is a text that is a joy to read. I hope everyone grabs a copy – it’s one you can give to friends who are not “political” but just like a good tale as well as friends who really want to know more about how we got into the mess we’re in.

Thank you so much. I’m so pleased you like it!
I became fascinated by the human dimension of his story, and the folly it signifies. I saw a classic tale of a modest man who gets caught up in events outside his control and who winds up have an extraordinary impact on history. The book relies on my reporting from three trips to Iraq, as well as trips to Iraq, England, Israel, Jordan, etc. I reviewed thousands of pages of official reports, investigative files, archival material, private e-mails and other documents. I interviewed more than 80 current and former intelligence officers, government officials, UN weapons inspectors and others directly involved in the case. I didn’t get every detail, since much remains classified, but I’m convinced I wrote the most complete account possible at this time.

Like the ‘Material Girl” Madonna created the American Dream drives a society to consume, keep up with the Jones and jones on power from the poorest to the richest we are about wealth, power and achievement from sports to profession. There is no chance that morality and ethics will be allowed in the halls of power. Humanism is DOA. We are a wealth assembly line that is addicted to resources. Even government is caught up and law serves the powerful. Sorry to be so callous. I agree that “The Ugly American has become a study in “Dorian Gray”. Morality is a paid for commodity in donations to “charity” not a guide to conduct. The corporate culture rules. What to do?